I knew I was condemned from the moment they took the gold candlesticks. They ripped up the carpets and tore aged curtains from their oak rails. Workers clad in grey overalls lifted every part of me away, chucking it into body bags of white.
I watched as they gutted me, helpless to the whims of their greed. As three moving trucks crunched across the sandstone gravel, my inhabitants screamed.
They’d screamed before, in joy, in pain, in childbirth, at war. Prone, I saw them jostle, jeering at the windows, their faces unseen by the walkers passing us. Nobody could admit what would happen, for it was sure now that I was dying.
“How could you let them take it away?” the Lavender Lady screamed at her husband. He turned to her, the abrasion on his cricked neck the brightest color in the room. Others turned to the pair, each form outlined in their color, unchanged since death. The Grey Lady sighed as the trucks vanished beyond the hill, turning from the window.
“Do you think I could have done anything?” her husband shouted, making one of the children, Will, cry.
***
As the sun dipped below the horizon, Will’s cries grew stronger until the Grey Lady took him from the room. They’d go to the garden to watch the sun sink in a plume of gold feathers.
The ghost girl stood by the wall tracing the curves of the paneling with her hand. In her other hand, she clutched a bunch of daisies.
We didn’t know her.
I remembered the day she arrived, posy clutched in both hands, face caked with funeral lacquer. We would never know her. Now, her name had been removed with the trucks. If she’d been alive, tears would have clung to her eyelashes. As she walked through the wall, I knew I wouldn’t see her again. A flurry of sunlit dust collected my goodbye to her.
“You shouldn’t have sold Hummerstone,” the Lavender Lady insisted. A stare only the dead could muster aimed at her husband.
“We have been dead for over three hundred years. This is not my fault,” he cried.
When the couple first gazed upon me, we’d all been young. My stone unmottled and blemish-free, glowing honey gold even on the greyest day. Their carriage had pulled up, faces illuminated in newlywed bliss.
I liked watching them. Happy, albeit naïve. She doted on him, and he on her, until he joined the rebels and found himself strung up beside them. She died later; the romantics called it a broken heart, but I saw her calculate her options. I saw her grow thin and tired. I saw her breath die. Then she rose again, her lavender gown frozen to her youthful form. I never saw another rise like she did.
On death, love had died. Unspoken words about idiocies and minuscule problems were aired between the couple. With eternity to nitpick, they fell from each other.
I contemplated my demise as night fell. I tried to tell myself it was a beautiful night to be my last, a star-pricked sky, my gargoyles gazing at the full moon. Under the canopy of midnight, more of my residents emerged, some predating me, some too modern to fit with the others. They wandered the halls, following trails I couldn’t see. I watched them all—every detail.
***
Rose dawn flecked the miserable sky, fitting, I suppose, for death. The true beauty of the sunrise was beyond my morbid thoughts. I returned my gaze to the residents as they emerged from their nightly soirées to crowd by the drive-facing windows once more.
I listened to the residents murmur. They would be released, and I would be destroyed. Was it selfish that I had wanted to die alongside them? I spent years watching their lives and their deaths and they wouldn’t give me the same.
As the first shudder rocked me, I felt the sickness rise. I was shaking.
The shaking grew beyond trembling as my western wall caved. I screamed from my heart, a scraping of stone, wood, and clay.
They hit me again. This time, I fell.
Kathryn Hatchett is a writer and student living in Somerset. Her writing focuses on the natural world, local history, and mental health. She can often be found exploring hidden-away locations with her border terrier, Jasper, at her heel. Her previous work, “Wings,” was published on Falwriting’s page. To join Kathryn on her adventures you can find her on Instagram @_kathrynhatchett_
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